Feasibility and clinical implementation of hand-held echocardiography

Echocardiography is essential in the evaluation of patients with suspected or known cardiovascular disease. The development of pocket-size hand-held echocardiographic devices, suitable for a quick assessment of cardiac structures and function, has been shown to improve diagnostics and patient workflow. In the hands of experts, pocket-size machines capable of gray tone and color flow imaging offer high accuracy for the assessment of ventricular function, the detection of pericardial and pleural effusions and are suitable for semiquantitative evaluation of valvular function. The machines are also suitable for noncardiac imaging. Point-of-care echocardiography with pocket-size hand-held echocardiographic devices should be an integrated part of the physical examination of patients in many situations and will probably be performed by an increasing number of both experts and nonexperts as well. However, the benefit relies on the level of competence of the users and tailored training is needed to answer specific questions.